hahahaha

Hah! I'm sure that's what they're going to do, and not just roll out CGN to their end users.

BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

The cable ISPs in Mexico have been doing CGN since forever. Those cheap bastards have done that to "save" on buying IP blocks. It also breaks a lot of stuff on the 'net. In fact, my first "experience" with NAT was thanks to those guys.

Oh dear.

It proves that there are people in the IT industry that have been infested by conservatardism. Really sad.

I would take him seriously if he were to say that he's a traitor in the sense that his whistle blowing activities are questionable, but no. He basically goes down the "everyone should've know about the NSA stuff and what he released was unnecessary but harmful". It was only "harmful" on US-based cloud computing stuff, which is probably why he's throwing a tantrum on Snowden's affair. And legally the NSA shouldn't be able to do all of this, but it is probably covered by the infamous PATRIOT Act. So no, nobody expected the NSA to pull off what amounts to a blanket wiretap on all US comms, including ordinary citizens. That is what angered people.

Re: Bye bye Brand America

Until the 1990s, USA was flying pretty high as an international brand.

Maybe in Europe, but over here in the American continent, most if not every single country south of the US border has been wary of the US. Especially due to their Central/South America misbehavior. How do you think Hugo Chavez got to be president? Down in Central and South America, the surefire way to win the presidential ticket these days is to be an anti-imperialist (that is, anti-USA) dude.

Re: So....

" He has explicitly said that any security bugs in OpenSSH, he will not report it to the FreeBSD project, because someone once made him cry."

Interesting -- may we have a reference?

You aren't familiar with Theo de Raadt, are you? The guy's basically a 5 year old in the body of an adult, throwing tantrums on everything. This is the guy that called Linux a hackjob just because it ended up being more popular than his renegade branch off BSD (itself a product of another of his tantrums). LibreSSL seems to be his most recent tantrum, though his concerns might be actually valid on OpenSSL (how the hell did they let something like Heartbleed sit around for 2 years?!). But notice that one of the things LibreSSL cut was FIPS 140-2 support, which is probably dumb. Oh well...

Maybe Obama should listen.

It's becoming very clear that putting Wheeler as the Big Man in the FCC was an awful mistake. Obama should ax him and put a more competent dude, preferably someone who doesn't have a conflict of interest in that post.

Nice.

I was kinda expecting the 'net dudes to torpedo TPP, but it seems that most of the 'net dudes were lulled into a false sense of security after SOPA/PIPA got torpedoed and ACTA was killed by the aftermath of that. Still it's good to see that the other parties being hard-hit by these stupid treaties are ganging up. Hopefully they'll actually kill this stupid TPP thingy.

Of course, we'll still have to keep an eye for the next TPP/ACTA/whatever revival in a couple of years.

Re: Its not suprising.. @Sandtitz

Mexico, sometime around late 2012/early 2013. Suppliers were insisting on Win8 because MS wanted that, company just plain put the brakes on purchases. They did eventually start buying PCs with the same agreement you've mentioned, where Win7 Pro was preinstalled instead of Win8. But a more obvious telltale of 8's rejection is that there was an XP to 7 migration project, and they didn't switch it to "XP to 8" even with the volume license discounts that MS was doling out. It could have saved them money, but they preferred to keep 7 as the migration path.

Interestingly, MS is giving out "XP to 8" incentives, but IIRC only charities have taken in those offers.

Re: Downvoters

Up/downvotes have no effect in your standing. Upvotes count towards the badges award, but down votes are irrelevant. Unlike other commenting systems, the up votes and down votes are simply for comment judgement alone. Otherwise the usual MS shills would have had awful standing by now.

Re: Its not suprising..

Really, how many of the MS shills/apologists actually work in IT departments? Most, if not all of our large companies have pretty much banned Windows 8.x from their premises. When MS was strong-arming OEMs to sell only Win8 boxes, one of our clients cancelled all PC purchases. This client is a Fortune 500 company, by the way.

Sure, people might adapt, but it doesn't mean they will want to do so, and if the interface is strange they will be less productive. No, Win8 isn't like driving a manual/standard car, it's like driving a standard car that has the stick shift mounted on the ceiling, or a motorcycle with a stick shift instead of the foot gear shifter you usually have on a motorbike.

Gaaah!

So it's true? They're slamming that awful flat Dock on the new OSX? Damn, and now that I'm barely warming up to upgrade to Mavericks! Wondering if they're taking Microsoft's cue on making the UI step backwards (Start Screen reminded me of the god-awful Program Manager from Win3.x when I first saw it)

Heh.

But there's a catch with Snowden's claims. Where did he send those emails from?

If it was from Lavabit or another public webmail service, he's spot on with this proving that they are in fact snooping on everyone's emails.

However, if he sent it from his NSA organizational email system, there's a good chance the NSA is already storing a copy of every single email sent by anyone inside the NSA. Why? Because companies have this right, and I'm sure as hell the NSA has it as well. Especially for "national security", as someone might leak state secrets using email.

It's the MFN clause!

it's hard to see how a company with a mere 10% market share of ebook sales at best was the dangerous one in breach of anti-trust regulations, while Amazon—who have over 90%—were not.

You're missing the whole picture. The "Amazon is the dominant player" card is what Apple tried to use to justify their actions. But in reality, they were involved in a price-fixing conspiracy that gave plausible deniability to both parties thanks to how the contracts were made. The key was in the following things:

Publishers were giving Apple the books under the "agency" model, which unlike the "wholesale" model the price per book is fixed by the publisher. Apple gets to set the percentage they keep, which they put at 30%. Up till here it seems to be OK, except:

Apple added a "Most Favoured Nation" clause. Publishers that sell to Apple can't offer lower prices to other vendors, like Amazon/Kindle. Thus this clause forces everyone else to a) switch to the agency model, even if they don't want, and b) sell at the price point that the publisher has fixed. Oh, but the publishers could just point and say "oh but Apple is selling them at that price and we can't offer 'em cheaper due to our MFN contract!". But the truth is that the e-book market as a whole had a massive price hike after Apple & Co. made their deal; it was getting so stupid that paper books ended up being cheaper in some cases! And that's why Apple lost; the price hike was so noticeable that it was successfully proven in court.

Go on green?

Is it just me, or is the 1 second delay after green light actually a real-life safety feature? Especially in big cities, where someone will run a red light. In fact, here in Mexico City there's already a 2 second delay between the red going on in one street to the green going on on the other one. And even then, it is still wise to wait because there's bound to be a jackass plowing through the intersection.

Oh, and now try doing that on a motorcycle. I've always waited a second or two, and I've seen at least twice an HGV hurtling down the intersection not giving two fucks about the red light. There's a particular intersection where red light runners are the norm, not the exception. I'm not about to gun the throttle just to get splattered all over the pavement!

PGP

Looks like PGP is indeed going to be the solution for this. That's what I used before jumping to OSX. My license was stuck at the 10.x version, which seems to be no longer available for download so I'm screwed. I'll have to buy a new license if I want to use that.

Or, I simply open up my PGP volumes with my Windows VM and just make all new portable media devices as FileVault2 volumes. Sad, as I lose the "multi-OS" approach but lacking TrueCrypt, there isn't much I can do. I'll also stick to LUKS for Linux.

Re: Who taught these children ??

I think it depends on the kind of kid you're showing this stuff to. There will be kids interested in working on older stuff, probably just for the "how did they do this without current tech?" value. Maybe an Apple II isn't that good to spark that question on a kid, but I've seen it happen with mechanical stuff. That is, stuff like a mechanical calculator; that'll garner a lot of interest. "Wow, this thing can add, subtract, multiply and divide without using electricity? No microchips? Cool!!!"

An Apple II probably would garner more attention if you can show at least basic stuff working like "phonebook program" or something like that. I know my dad was able to make me get interested in his age-old TI-59 calculator as a kid.

Re: Government On Your Side?

Nuh-uh. The Mexican Government's current "edition" owes its ass to Televisa. In fact, DirecTV winded down its Mexico operations because SKY owned the market sometime around the turn of the 21st Century. Any attempt to barge into Televisa/TV Azteca's duopoly will fail miserably, mostly because Peña Nieto depends on those media moguls to prop up his government.

Fact checking...

but then there remains Dish, already competing head-on with DirecTV in Mexico, but with no larger Latin America footprint.

Um… DirecTV hasn't operated in Mexico for at least 10 years, maybe longer. They lost out to SKY, which in Mexico is owned by our own evil media mogul: Televisa's Owner Emilio Azcarraga. That guy is basically the Mexican Rupert Murdoch… which makes SKY Mexico being owned by Azcarraga somewhat appropriate.

Yes, it's time to switch

I'm pretty sure that MS has done too little, too late on the whole XB180 issue. By the time they started backtracking, the damage had been done. At this point, having your game as an XB1 exclusive is probably going to be a bad thing; maybe that's why Titanfall has also been released for the XB360. Hell, even the exclusives are having lackluster reception; Dead Rising 3 has sold 1.2 million copies after 4 months, while inFAMOUS Second Son sold 1 million in 9 days. Oh, want to compare it to a similar bestseller exclusive on the XB1? After a month, Titanfall sold 925k copies… and that includes PC and XB360 sales.

The XB1 isn't quite dying, but it's getting a lukewarm reception. People are either holding on to their PS3s and 360's or just buying PS4s.

Re: Option C

The problem here isn't about dudes going to their interview while stoned, but that the FBI restriction on hiring spans 3 years backwards. I don't know of any drug that has a 3 year lasting effect on your brain, though you might feel that long depending on the mind-altering drug...

Re: PS4 best platform to play this on.

As much as I like the PS4, and as much as it is better in the tech department over the X-Bone … both consoles are basically rebadged PCs with mad GPU specs. I weeped when I found out that the next gen consoles were falling to the x86 dark side. I'm guessing the PC version has the appeal that most id games have: the ability to churn out mods.

Sadly, it seems that this one wasn't made by id Software but by someone else using the idTech engine. Still I'd like to check it out. Though I'll have to do so on PC, because my stepson has been glued to GTA5 Online and I can't get him to give up the PS3...

Ah, encryption and hashing

A lot of people, and a couple of places do not seem to know the difference between encrypting and hashing. I still remember someone talking about how their password database was very secure because they used "MD5 encryption" on all passwords. The usage of "secure", "MD5" and calling a hashing function as "encryption" almost caused an embolism on our security expert.

And then there are a lot of people who insist on using decryptable password encryption mechanisms for "password recovery" situations. Oh dear...

Re: AKA LLU

There's a fun thing about the US: somethig akin to LLU was already in existence sometime around 2000, but a lazy version. A DSL line had to be served by three different companies by law; the telco, the ISP and... Can't remember what the other one did. Sometime during the last decade that changed, up to a point that your telco is your DSL ISP and you get no choice. The land of the free, and home of the guy who buys his way to a monopoly by filling the FCC's pockets!

So I was spot on...

I missed the Sony article here, but I do remember some articles sprouting up about "Sony bringing back the cassette tape" and me going "lolwut? Sounds like a new LTO cartridge. Those have never died!" And it looks I was right.

I do wonder why tape mfgs love to tout "compressed" data capacities? I remember being bit by this when I was doing my backups on DDS4, only to find out that they didn't fit 40Gbs but 20Gbs unless you compress. Bzip2 was painfully slow on the processors I had on hand back then so I ended up using more DAT DDS4 tapes to speed up the process.

Ummm nope

"Developers don't want to make games for the Kinnect."

I think its far to early to believe that. Kinect Sports is out soon for instance, and Dance Central is probably on it's way too.

Kinect Sports should've been out on release day, if the Kinect-as-a-main-feature hype is to be believed. After all, it was there from day one on the Wii, which is what both MS and Sony were copying when they made Kinect and the Move systems.

Dance Central is… probably not going to come. Harmonix hasn't announced much beyond "great plans for Rock Band and Dance Central", if they were serious about bringing Dance Central 4 to the XB180 they would've done so already. I'm so reminded of game franchises that never got sequels even when announced; I'm still waiting for that ObsCure sequel we were promised… noticeable that ObsCure 2 was a PS2 game. I wouldn't be surprised if the "next" Dance Central ends up being vaporware or indefinitely postponed.

Re: Meh.

>>"You wanted less competition and a Sony monopoly? Are you retarded?"

Maybe they just wanted everyone who bought one to lose out big time and all the companies and people who invested time and money into games for it to suffer huge losses.

Anyone who bought an XB1 even after MSFT repeatedly showed they don't care about end users (ramming DRM until Sony 0wn3d them on that area; ramming mandatory Kinect "always on" smack in the middle of the Snowden affair, only relenting a few weeks before release; and it is until now that they offer a Kinect-less device).

And most gaming firms should have plenty of multiplatform games to offset losses from failing platforms. Pretty much every console generation has had one casualty, or at least one console underperforming, the sole exception being the Wii/PS3/360 where none of the three platforms was a failure. Anyone must have smelled the blood after the XB1 DRM fiasco and it would be stupid to bet all their marbles on that platform.

I do find it funny that MS shills seem to think that an Xbox failure will leave Sony as the only player in town. Nintendo may have hit a dud with the Wii U, but they're still in the game, and they're still going strong with the Wii installed base anyway. Then there's the Steam console, and I'm pretty sure that an Xbox void would be filled rapidly by newcomers. After all, Sony rose from nothing to #1 gaming platform in a matter of years with the PSX, dethroning the big N and surpassing Sega at the same time.

Meh.

I wanted MSFT's failure to be massive, and these changes are probably going to stop the Xbox FAIL boat from leaking. If only Sony hadn't made PS+ mandatory for online gaming, MSFT might've just given up on Gold-for-online-play as well. But at least it does show that mandatory Kinect, mandatory Gold for stuff you're already paying for is a no-no in the gaming market. And of course, the stupid secondhand-banning DRM as well.

I wonder if the Kinect-less XB1 will silently replace all the unsold ones gathering dust in the stores?

Re: Let the Circus ... begin!

I don't think the Net Neutrality dudes are asking "same price for everyone and everyone gets the same shit". ISPs charge for bandwidth, they should either up their infrastructure to match what they're actually offering, jack up their prices to do the aforementioned upgrade, or simply lower their advertised data rate to match what they can actually serve.

As it stands, the ISPs want to double-dip everyone, increasing their profits without actually having to upgrade their infrastructure.

Re: What bothers me most about all this

I do understand how the internet works. I also remember that a lot of backbone upgrades during the dot-com boom in the late 90's was said to be underused and a couple of telcos went bust for that. So technically, all those ISPs should just fire up that extra bandwidth and get more phat pipes for free. Instead, they're simply upping what they charge for and simply don't even upgrade their backhaul, then use "not enough pipes" as a reason to pull off this stupid tiered internet.

No, the ISPs aren't going to upgrade their backbone links unless they are forced to do so by regulation, and that's what the FCC should be doing. Not appeasing them with these stupid things!

Snowden

They occasionally do get it right

One of the funny things about Swordfish is that at least some of the "techno babble" was accurate: 512-bit RSA can be cracked via quadratic sieve while 1024-bit still hasn't been cracked in a useful timeframe.

Other movies have at least tried to make some of the hacking plausible; Matrix Reloaded had Trinity use an ssh exploit, while Elysium had the Deus Ex Machina reboot/rewriting code written in some weird derivative of x86 assembly (and in true hacker fashion, segments of it are shown in shellcode).

I'm guessing it'll all fall down on which experts they're going to get, the real ones or the "Visual Basic GUI" dudes.

Re: Things are hidden :-(

Run --> cmd

ipconfig /all

Read "Physical Address" for the appropriate NIC.

That's exactly what he said he did. But you shouldn't need to do that if the info is also accessible from the Control Panel, and it isn't easy to relay these instructions to a regular user over the phone.

Re: Apparently it's hard to run a secure currency.

The difference is, cryptocurrencies allow you to be your own bank (well, except the loaning part) and not having to trust an untrustworthy third party.

Nope. You can be your own bank if you wish with "fiat" money, but you need to be really good in accounting. And doing a crypto currency bank, yes you can do it, and yes you can do loaning. The problem there is that it's going to be harder to collect unpaid debts.

Re: Where have you been Murphy?!

My uncle Frank was a volunteer ambulance driver in Spain when Hitler was testing his new toys. Forgetting their sacrifice borders on criminal behavior.

Indeed. May I remind you that the US and the rest of the Allies gave Francisco Franco's regime a free pass? That's the same guy who asked the Third Reich for help, which was given in the form of said toy testing.

The Allied Victory, by the way, was also shared with the USSR, which pounced Nazi Germany from the East as well.

Re: NO WE DO NOT NEED NAT

But the RFC1918 addys were needed … for IPv4. IPv6 added the link-local and site-local addresses, in addition to the global-scope addys. You can, and should, use the local addys for most internal networks stuff, while the global ones are supposed to be used only for internet-bound traffic. Even Microsoft has got that right, with Windows stuff using link-local whenever possible.

I'm not quite sure why site-local was deprecated, because that was basically RFC1918 for IPv6. But something similar was drafted for private addresses anyway, so it isn't like the need isn't covered already.

Re: SLAAC is the problem, not the solution

I remember a specific command I could use in Solaris 10 to set up my own preferred device ID when using SLAAC. Can't remember the exact command but it was something like

ifconfig en0 inet6 token ::1337:b00b:cafe/64

you had to put something akin to this on the hostname6 file for it to persist across reboots. The end result was that even using SLAAC you would get a "static" IPv6 addy with the added benefit of having all the IPv6 routing configured automatically.

NO WE DO NOT NEED NAT

NAT is an abomination in the world of IP and should be thrown away. It only exists because we were running out of IPv4 addys and needed a quick fix while IPv6 came out. Of course, IPv6 itself is now 15+ years late in being globally deployed so NAT has become a "given" everywhere. But it has damaged the network mindset of at least one IT generation, which now thinks that NAT is extra security. It isn't.

The reason most people think NAT adds security is because every NAT device is also running a firewall that blocks incoming requests as well. But the added "block by default" security can be implemented even without NAT. This myth should be put out to pasture and the real internet concept of "every node reachable in the net" should be reinstated. Sure, for all means you should have firewalls to block unwanted access to servers in the backend, and servers that don't need internet access should get only private IPv6 addys. But no more NAT voodoo tricks please!